Most Shared

The Leather Jacket That’s so Rock ’n’ Roll, It Comes with Its Own Concert Tee

What happened to leather jackets? They are now charming and cropped, adorned with poppy tufts of dyed fur, as well as polished and ladylike. Sure, it’s a nice look that can take you from the office to the weekend in chic stride but where’s its rock ’n’ roll essence? All of those sticky splotches of spilled beer and the worn-in wears and tears that make a leather jacket a closet staple and give it true character?

That might be a thing of a past—or an expensive rarity excavated from a vintage store, but designer Courtney Michelle Ogilvie of C/CHRST has her own way of putting the grit of music back into the piece—and like all good things, it starts from the inside. For her fall 2015 collection, the designer sewed her vintage concert tees into the linings of leather jackets, starting with her own battered Misfits shirt. “That was my shirt from high school, those are my holes! That was me doing really bad things,” explains the designer in her chilled-out West Coast drawl (she was born and raised in California). “I think two essential pieces that people should have in their collection are a vintage rock tee and a really well-tailored form-fitting leather jacket. Why not put them together and have the world be part of that moment and that culture?” Eventually, Ogilvie teamed up with a vintage T-shirt distributor in Oregon to expand her collection, scoring throwback gems from Guns N’ Roses, Blondie, the Grateful Dead, the Clash, and more.

As for the leather jackets themselves, on the outside, they are tailored and fitted. “I have a closet filled with leather jackets, vintage and not vintage. I spent a weekend putting on every jacket and writing down everything that was wrong with it and taking those notes and building my own,” says Ogilvie. “I wanted it to hit one inch below your pant- and waistline—I feel like that is where a jacket looks good and shapes a woman’s body. Also, I don’t know why everyone makes their jackets with the baggiest shoulders in the world. I wanted the shoulder to really be rounded so you don’t look like a football player.”

Ogilvie owns a distributing company in Los Angeles, uses Italian leather, hires someone to hand-cut the leather, and spends three days in San Diego with someone who sews each jacket. “I went through almost nineteen different patterns to get that shoulder to look like a woman’s shirt,” says the designer. “The big deal for me was getting that fit dead on.”

But it’s not all party on the inside and business in the back. If there is a tour date on the tee, for instance, she will attach it to the back of a jacket. "I found this sick The Who shirt from 1989 with Maximum RnB on the front; on the back, it says The Kids Are Alright,” says Ogilvie. "How are you going to waste that?” It’s evident that her dedication to preserving the vintage concert pieces runs deep, though she does admit to taking a few liberties. “There are so many memories in these shirts! You think about the dude who was wearing them at the show,” Ogilvie says. "But I do wash them—they don’t smell like a bar.”